Category: efficiency
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Is Weaving Hard?
click to biggify – 25% green Fox Fibre weft I never tell my students that weaving is hard. Rather I tell them that the creation of cloth is a complex process and if they take the time to learn the steps in that process and the language of the technology, they too can learn how…
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Smooth Weaving
This morning I opened my email inbox and found the following message: “I was weaving a scarf last night and realized something awesome. I just had to tell you that since watching your video a few months ago on throwing the shuttle, my edges have improved tremendously. I don’t fiddle with them anymore and both edges…
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Work Space
Even though I have what might be considered a relatively large space for my studio, there is never enough room for everything that needs to be done. At one point, to facilitate production, we decided that it would be most effective if one of us wound warps outside the loom while I was weaving the warp…
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Reprieve
With chemo delayed a week I’ve been using the reprieve to work my way through the shawl warps. Here is my work table with boxes of filled pirns, spools awaiting warp yarn, more cones of weft yarn to be wound onto pirns, and in the foreground a bucket of skeins waiting to be wound onto…
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Thinking Ahead
So, here is a much younger me with my Whitin winder. One of the things I want to talk about during the general session address in Quebec is the equipment I have invested in over the years. This winder is the cat’s meow in terms of winding pirns. I bought it from Allen Fannin in…
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Fixing A Threading Error
I started weaving on this Summer and Winter warp and only after messing about with the cloth advance for a while, cutting off, re-sleying and started weaving again did I realize that I’d had a brain cramp while threading and that 3 units were threaded onto the incorrect shaft. When you have a threading error…
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Fibre Fusion
There is a new fibre festival happening, this one in Grand Forks, BC. Grand Forks is a few minutes away from the WA border, several hours from Spokane, WA. The festival is being run in conjunction with a larger arts event happening in the area, so there are lots of events for everyone. 🙂 Fibre…
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On Soapboxes
about 30 yards of scarves….I have two soapboxes – one for each foot, obviously. :^) One is wet finishing. The other is issues of ergonomics/efficiency. Handweavers can in no way compete with industry and looms that weave hundreds of picks per minute. A handweaver is therefore by definition making ‘slow’ cloth. People tell me they…
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Necessity
Yesterday I finished the red/orange warp and beamed the blue/purple one. This morning I started weaving. As usual I started with a few picks to weave a header, then rolled the warp forward to leave about 6″ for the fringe and started weaving again. And started thinking about necessity. When I first started weaving, I…
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Finesse
painted warp This morning I finished transcribing WeaveCast 50 with James Koehler, tapestry artist. One of the things he talked about was developing finesse. How does one achieve finesse? One must work purposefully, analytically, constantly assessing what one is doing and the results being achieved. And then asking yourself if you are happy with those…